GeForce GTX 650 Ti Graphics Cards Roundup

Today we are going to review five entry level graphics cards that come at a very affordable price, including a reference design from Nvidia, GeForce GTX 650 Ti based proprietary products from ECGA, Gigabyte and Zotac, and Zotac GeForce GT 640. What does this price range have to offer to us these days? Let’s find out!

Mainstream graphics cards priced at $100 to $200 are known to enjoy the highest demand among users. Represented in the current generation by such models as AMD’s Radeon HD 7850 and HD 7870 and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660 and 660 Ti, they support all cutting-edge technologies and can deliver acceptable performance in the latest 3D games. However, not all users need such performance, so they look for cheaper and simpler solutions.

These are AMD’s Radeon HD 7770 and HD 7750 we tested earlier and the recently released Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti. It is about the latter product that we’re going to talk in this review. Besides a reference GeForce GTX 650 Ti, we’ve got three original versions from EVGA, Gigabyte and Zotac. We will also take a look at Zotac’s GeForce GT 640 which is officially positioned as the junior gaming graphics card with an Nvidia GPU.

Testing Participants

Technical Specifications and Recommended Pricing

Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB

We got our Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti without any packaging except for an antistatic pack. The card looks modest, being a mere 145 mm long.

The black PCB matches the black plastic of the cooler. The latter seems to be huge, but that’s only an illusion because the PCB is perhaps the smallest among all gaming graphics cards.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti is equipped with two dual-link DVI and one mini-HDMI 1.4a connector.

We can see a standard 6-pin power connector in its usual location:

According to its specs, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti consumes up to 110 watts of power. A computer with one such card is recommended to have a 400-watt or higher PSU. Products of this class lack connectors for SLI configurations.

The exceedingly simplified PCB features a 3-phase power system with two phases for the GPU and one for the memory chips.

The memory chips are all placed on the face side of the PCB although there are bonding pads for them on the reverse side, too. The GK106 GPU has no protective frame, so you should be especially careful when removing or installing a cooler on it. Our sample of the GPU is revision A1 and is dated the 30th week of 2012.

As opposed to the GK106, which is installed on the GeForce GTX 660, the GPU of the GTX 650 Ti has only 768 unified shader processors, 64 texture-mapping units and 16 raster operators (we can remind you that the GPU configuration of the GTX 660 is 960/80/24). The GPU clock rate is lower as well. Instead of base and boost frequencies of 980 and 1033 MHz, the GPU works at 928 MHz without any boost mode. This didn’t prevent graphics card makers from releasing pre-overclocked versions of this product as we will see shortly.

That’s the fastest kind of chips Hynix offers right now as they are rated for 6000 MHz. However, the reference GeForce GTX 650 Ti has a memory frequency of only 5400 MHz. Coupled with the 128-bit bus, this means a memory bandwidth of 86.4 GB/s. Not much by today’s standards, but we’re dealing with an entry-level graphics card after all.

Here is a summary of the reference GeForce GTX 650 Ti specs:

The cooling system is exceedingly simple, consisting of an aluminum heatsink and a plastic casing with an 80mm fan.

There’s too much thermal grease here.

To test the thermals of the reviewed graphics cards we are going to use five consecutive runs of a pretty resource-consuming Aliens vs. Predator (2010) game with the highest image quality settings in 1920x1080 resolution with 16x anisotropic filtering and MSAA 4x antialiasing. We used MSI Afterburner 2.3.0 and GPU-Z 0.6.6 as monitoring tools. This test was performed inside a closed system case at 23°C room temperature. All thermal tests were carried out before we took the card apart, i.e. with its default thermal interface still intact.

Let’s see how this simple cooler copes with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti when its fan is regulated automatically or set at the maximum speed.

Auto fan mode

Maximum fan speed

The cooler’s performance is good enough for its primitive design. The GPU is only 65°C hot in the automatic fan regulation mode when the fan works at 26% speed. At the full speed of the fan, the GPU is 57°C hot. The noise factor will be discussed later on.

It was quite exciting for us to overclock our Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti. By increasing the memory frequency step by step, we reached 7200 MHz (or +33.3%) whereas the GPU was stable after our raising its clock rate by 160 MHz (+17.2% to its default clock rate).

That’s just excellent for such a cheap graphics card. In fact, it is the best combined (GPU+memory) result in this test session. The final clock rates of our Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti were 1088/7200 MHz:

When overclocked, the GPU got a mere 1°C hotter. Its peak temperature was 68°C:

And the fan seemed to rotate at the same speed as before.

EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC 1GB (01G-P4-3652-KR)

On the front of the box you can see the manufacturer’s name, model name, memory type and memory amount together with the mysterious abbreviation SSC. For detailed specs and key features you can refer to the back of the packaging.

The card is shipped together with a DVI->D-Sub adapter, a power adapter (two PATA->one 6-pin connector), a CD with drivers and utilities, an EVGA sticker, an installation guide, and two leaflets:

The EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC is manufactured in China and costs $149.9. Included into this price is the manufacturer’s official 3-year warranty. EVGA offers as many as four GeForce GTX 650 Ti models. Ours is one of the two faster variants (the other fast version is equipped with 2 gigabytes of memory).

The external difference from the reference card is limited to the plastic casing with the manufacturer’s and product’s names.

The whole card and its PCB are each 145 mm long. The dual-slot design makes it 38 mm thick. Besides the standard selection of video interfaces (dual-link DVI ports and one mini-HDMI version 1.4a), there is a vent grid in the card’s mounting bracket to exhaust the hot air out of the computer case:

As opposed to the reference sample, the EVGA version does exhaust the hot air since its casing covers it from every side, except for the fan.

A 6-pin power connector is placed in the top right corner of the PCB.

Despite the increased clock rates, EVGA recommends a 400-watt PSU and claims that the card’s peak power draw is not higher than 110 watts, just as written in Nvidia’s official specs.

The PCB follows the reference design with a 2+1-phase power system and memory chips on its face side.

As opposed to the reference card, the EVGA has a protective plastic frame on the GPU.

The GPU clock rate is increased from the standard 928 MHz to 1072 MHz (+15.5%), which is the highest frequency among the products included into this test session, so we can tell you now that the SSC abbreviation stands for Super Super Clocked. The rest of the GPU specs are identical to the reference card.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC is equipped with 1 gigabyte of GDDR5 memory in the same Hynix H5GQ2H24AFR R0C chips as we’ve seen on the Nvidia card.

The memory is not pre-overclocked, working at 5400 MHz. The card drops its memory and GPU clock rate to 648 MHz and 324 MHz, respectively, in 2D applications.

Notwithstanding the considerably higher GPU clock rate compared to the reference card from Nvidia, the EVGA card’s GPU is colder: 60°C in the automatic fan regulation mode and 54°C at the maximum speed of the fan. Judging by the monitoring data, the fan only worked at 21% of its full capacity in the automatic mode. We wonder how EVGA managed to improve the cooler’s performance compared to the reference cooler. The only explanation we can think of is that the plastic casing contributes to this result by helping to exhaust the hot air out of the computer case.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC being pre-overclocked, we didn’t expect any miracles from it in our own overclockability tests. Indeed, we only managed to increase the GPU clock rate by 55 MHz, reaching 1127 MHz. The memory chips overclocked very well again, from 5400 MHz to 7200 MHz, just like on the reference Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti.

The memory bandwidth grew from 86.4 GB/s to 115.2 GB/s after our overclocking. The fill rate increased as well.

The overclocked EVGA remained cool enough, its peak GPU temperature being no higher than 66°C in the automatic fan regulation mode.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC leaves a very good overall impression even though its memory amount is 1 GB only.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB (GV-N65TOC-2GI)

Our graphics card roundups can but rarely do without Gigabyte products. The company is renowned for its original solutions with custom PCBs, increased clock rates and unique coolers. The new Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB is a good example.

The compact box isn’t really eye-catching but provides all important product-related information.

The card is safely wrapped into a soft antistatic pack. It is accompanied by a few accessories:

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti is manufactured in China and costs a little more than $170. Its warranty period is 2 years.

A glance over this product is enough to see that it’s not just a Gigabyte-branded copy of the reference GTX 650 Ti. It is as long as 249 mm although its PCB is 145 mm only, just like the PCBs of the two previous cards.

The face side of the PCB is covered by the WindForce 2X cooler which is about 40% longer than the PCB itself.

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti offers an unusual selection of video interfaces including two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI and one D-Sub.

There’s also a vent grid in the card’s mounting bracket.

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti has one 6-pin power connector facing up.

It may be less convenient than when the power connector faces back, but Gigabyte engineers had no other choice due to the employed cooler. The power requirements are identical to those of the reference sample: 110 watts for the graphics card and 400 watts for a computer containing it.

The PCB differs from the reference one in color only.

The 2+1-phase power system is managed by a UPi Semiconductor uP6210 controller. The graphics card belongs to the Ultra Durable 2 series which means that it features high-quality and exceptionally reliable components.

Its GPU was manufactured on the 34th week of 2012.

It is pre-overclocked to 1033 MHz (+11.3%). That’s quite a lot, even though not as high as the GPU clock rate of the EVGA card.

The memory chips are the same type as those of the Nvidia and EVGA cards discussed above, but the amount of memory is doubled to 2 gigabytes.

The memory frequency is, unfortunately, left at the standard level of 5400 MHz, so the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti specs only differ from the reference card’s in GPU clock rate and related parameters.

Besides the pre-overclocked GPU, the Gigabyte boasts an original cooler called WindForce 2X.

It consists of an aluminum heatsink with two copper pipes, 6 mm in diameter. The pipes are part of the cooler’s base and, judging by the thermal grease imprint, are ideally suited to contact the 221sq.mm GPU die.

The heatsink is made of thin aluminum plates press-fitted on the pipes with a spacing of 1 mm.

The heatsink is thin at about 10 mm, so the two 90mm PWM-regulated fans don’t find it difficult to blow the air through such densely placed fins. This is confirmed by our temperature test:

Auto fan mode

Maximum fan speed

As you can see, the WindForce 2X does its job very well: 47°C in the automatic regulation mode and only 43°C at the maximum speed of the two fans. That’s much better in comparison with the two previous graphics cards.

Despite the high-performance cooler, the card itself couldn’t show anything special in terms of overclocking potential. We could only increase its GPU clock rate by 45 MHz and its memory clock rate by 1760 MHz.

The resulting clock rates were 1078/7160 MHz:

Although the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti couldn’t impress us with its overclockability, its WindForce 2X cooler once again delivered outstanding performance, never letting the GPU get hotter than 50°C.

This refers to the automatic fan regulation mode when the fans only worked at 1680 RPM. The Gigabyte has no rivals in terms of GPU temperature among the graphics cards we’ve tested so far today.

Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition 2GB (ZT-61103-10M)

Zotac offers as many as three GeForce GTX 650 Ti models and we’ve got the fastest of them: Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition. There’s information about the card and Nvidia technologies implemented in it on the front and back of its small cardboard box.

There’s nothing special about the accessories which include a video interface adapter, a power cable, a CD with drivers and some documentation.

The made-in-China product costs $169.9. The warranty period is 2 years.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition seems to be the most beautiful graphics card in this review. The sculpted anodized metallic casing and the bright orange fan that sits on top of an aluminum heatsink make this graphics card very attractive.

The embellishments didn’t affect the size of the card which is 145x100x38 mm. There are memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB. Instead of one mini-HDMI, there are two standard HDMI outputs.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition also has two DVI outputs and a 6-pin power connector:

Unlike the other graphics cards in this review, the Zotac is recommended to be used with a 450 rather than 400-watt PSU.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition has a reference PCB but seems to have four power phases, two of which are responsible for the GK106 GPU.

After removing the generous amount of thermal grease, we can learn that the GPU was manufactured on the 34th week of 2012. It is revision A1.

The GPU is clocked at 1033 MHz in 3D mode, which is 11.3% higher than the reference card’s and equal to the Gigabyte’s GPU frequency. The EVGA is somewhat faster in terms of GPU clock rate.

The PCB carries eight memory chips, just like the three previous cards. The total amount of memory is 2 gigabytes.

The heatsink of the Zotac cooler is similar to those of the Nvidia and EVGA cards, remaining effectively a chunk of aluminum.

Thanks to the more advanced Everflow T129215SH fan, the GPU is cooled better than on the Nvidia and EVGA cards.

Auto fan mode

Maximum fan speed

In the automatic fan regulation mode, when the fan worked at only 23% of its maximum speed, the GPU was 58°C hot. At 100% fan speed, the GPU temperature wasn’t higher than 52°C. The Gigabyte remains unrivalled, but the Zotac is quite a cold card, too.

The memory clock rate is 1782 MHz while the rest of the specs are as follows:

The card is cooled by a simple aluminum heatsink with a 60mm Everflow T126010SU fan.

It keeps the GPU as cool as 54°C at peak load, though.

As for overclocking potential, we managed to increase the GPU and memory frequencies of our Zotac GeForce GT 640 by 160 and 200 MHz, respectively.

The final frequencies of 1062/2182 MHz are good enough for such a simple and cheap graphics card with DDR3 memory.

The overclocked GPU grew 5°C hotter, reaching 59°C.

Noise Level

We measured the level of noise using an electronic noise-level meter CENTER-321 in a closed and quiet room about 20 sq. meters large. The noise measurements were taken outside the system case, when the only noise source was the cooling system and its fans. The noise-level meter was set on a tripod at a distance of 15 centimeters from the graphics card cooler fan rotor. The mainboard with the graphics card was placed at the edge of a desk on a foam-rubber tray. The bottom limit of our noise-level metering device is 29.8 dBA whereas the subjectively comfortable (not low, but comfortable) level of noise when measured from that distance is about 36 dBA. The speed of the graphics cards’ fans was changed with the help of a special controller supporting 0.5 V voltage adjustment increments.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti, EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC and both cards from ZOTAC have no fan speed monitoring, so we constructed their graphs by extrapolating the maximum fan speed (according to the specs) to lower voltages. Of course, that’s not a very accurate approach since the correlation between speed and voltage is not linear, but we didn’t have any other method. Here are the results:

According to the diagram, Zotac’s GeForce GT 640 and GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition seem to be the quietest cards, but we should also note their fan speed during the temperature test. While the Zotac GeForce GT 640 is indeed quieter than the other four cards in this review, the Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti AMP! Edition is subjectively as loud as the cards from Nvidia and EVGA, all of them being rather uncomfortable.

The Gigabyte WindForce 2X cooler works at 1600 RPM in the automatic fan regulation mode, so it is quieter than the others, including the Zotac GeForce GT 640. The Gigabyte was also absolutely silent when idle whereas the Zotac GeForce GT 640, for example, was audible with its small but irritating fan against the background noise of our quiet testbed.

Power Consumption

We measured the power consumption of our testbed equipped with different graphics cards using a multifunctional Zalman ZM-MFC3 panel which can report how much power a computer (without the monitor) draws from a wall outlet. There were two test modes: 2D (editing documents in Microsoft Word or web surfing) and 3D (three runs of the Metro 2033: The Last Refuge benchmark at 2560x1440 with maximum image quality settings, but without antialiasing).

As you can see, our configuration with an overclocked six-core CPU needs less than 400 watts irrespective of the graphics card. It needs only 278 watts with the GeForce GT 640. The Radeons consume more power than their opponents, but not by much. The configurations with different GeForce GTX 650 Ti cards don’t differ much in their power requirements, but the EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti SSC needs more power than the overclocked Gigabyte. We can also note that the GeForce GTX 660 2GB configuration needs 62 watts more than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB configuration.

All the configurations are comparable to each other in terms of their power draw in idle mode.

Testbed Configuration and Testing Methodology

All participating graphics cards were tested in a system with the following configuration:

Besides the above discussed graphics cards we also added three more products to our review. The first one is MSI GeForce GTX 660 2 GB and it is included for comparison against GeForce GTX 650 Ti, in order to determine how big of a gap there is between them. The second card is Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 2 GB, which retails for more than GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2 GB, but the price difference is really small, so we regard it as a potential competitor to GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2 GB. And finally, the third graphics card is AMD Radeon HD 7770 1 GB, which is priced precisely between GeForce GT 640 and GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1 GB, so it makes sense to use it, too.

As usual, in order to lower the dependence of the graphics cards performance on the overall platform speed, I overclocked our 32 nm six-core CPU with the multiplier set at 37x, BCLK frequency set at 125 MHz and “Load-Line Calibration” enabled to 4.625 GHz. The processor Vcore was increased to 1.49 V in the mainboard BIOS:

Hyper-Threading technology was enabled. 16 GB of system DDR3 memory worked at 2 GHz frequency with 9-10-10-28 timings and 1.65V voltage.

The test session started on December 25, 2012. All tests were performed in Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 with all critical updates as of that date and the following drivers:

For our tests of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti we decided to stick only to one single resolution – 1920x1080 pixels, because the monitors supporting this resolution are currently selling for less than some GeForce GTX 650 Ti graphics cards from this roundup. This series of graphics is not fit for higher resolutions than that because of their insufficient performance, and any resolutions below 1920x1080 should be absolutely no problem for all testing participants.

The tests were performed in two image quality modes: “Quality+AF16x” – default texturing quality in the drivers with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering and “Quality+ AF16x+MSAA 4(8)x” with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering and full screen 4x or 8x antialiasing if the average framerate was high enough for comfortable gaming experience. We enabled anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing from the game settings. If the corresponding options were missing, we changed these settings in the Control Panels of Catalyst and GeForce drivers. We also disabled Vsync there. There were no other changes in the driver settings.

The list of games and applications used in this test session includes two popular semi-synthetic benchmarking suites, one technical demo and 15 games of various genres with all updates installed as of the beginning of the test session date:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (DirectX 11) – version 1.6.02, Enhanced Dynamic DX11 Lighting profile with all parameters manually set at their maximums, we used our custom cop03 demo on the Backwater map;

If the game allowed recording the minimal fps readings, they were also added to the charts. We ran each game test or benchmark twice and took the best result for the diagrams, but only if the difference between them didn’t exceed 1%. If it did exceed 1%, we ran the tests at least one more time to achieve repeatability of results.

Performance

3DMark Vantage

3DMark 2011

Unigine Heaven Demo

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Metro 2033: The Last Refuge

Just Cause 2

Aliens vs. Predator (2010)

Lost Planet 2

Sid Meier’s Civilization V

Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai

Crysis 2

Hard Reset Demo

Batman Arkham City

Battlefield 3

Nexuiz

Sniper Elite V2 Benchmark

Sleeping Dogs

F1 2012

Hitman: Absolution

We won’t discuss each benchmark in detail because all of them show the same general picture. So, we will only show you this table with complete test results and proceed to performance summary charts.

Summary Diagrams

First of all, let’s see how much slower the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB is in comparison with the GeForce GTX 660 2GB, at their default clock rates:

The gap is quite large. The GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB is an average 37% and 40% slower than the GeForce GTX 660 with full-screen antialiasing turned off and on, respectively. The price difference between them is 37%, too. The 2-gigabyte version of the GTX 650 Ti wouldn’t be any better as, according to the benchmarks, the extra 1 GB of memory doesn’t provide any benefits.

It’s also interesting to check out the difference between the reference GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB and the GeForce GT 640:

The junior card is only half as fast as its cousin. Considering that the GeForce GTX 650 Ti breaks no performance records itself, the GeForce GT 640 is definitely not a gaming product. It is rather meant for multimedia PCs or can be used as merely a display adapter to output 2D image to one or several monitors.

The Radeon HD 7850 is superior in every test including Nvidia’s favorite Lost Planet 2. The AMD-based solution is an average 24% faster than the Nvidia-based one without FSAA and 27% faster with FSAA. The difference in retail price between the simplest Radeon HD 7850 and the Zotac is about 10%, so the former is preferable.

The GeForce is 14 to 15% ahead across all the games, but the Radeon HD 7770 is capable of challenging it in a few tests.

Conclusion

On GeForce GTX 650 Ti performance: We are not really impressed with the performance of this graphics card in games. Yes, it is priced adequately, as its performance is somewhere in between that of the Radeon HD 7850 2GB and Radeon HD 7770 1GB. But this is where the question is: who is the primary competitor for GeForce GTX 650 Ti in this case? People with a little bigger budget will definitely prefer a Radeon HD 7850 and people with smaller budget will most likely buy a Radeon HD 7770 or even a non-gaming GeForce GT 640. As we’ve found out today, there’s no point in purchasing the more expensive version with 2 GB of memory because the extra memory doesn’t make it any faster. So, the GTX 650 Ti with its low price and modest performance cannot compete with the Radeon HD 7850, and the latter can’t be expected to get cheaper in the near future. The Radeon HD 7770 is already cheaper than the GTX 650 Ti 1GB, so we can’t expect any changes in its price, either.

On GeForce GT 640: Being only half as fast as the GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB, this card is not proportionally cheaper. It only allows comfortable gaming experience at 1280x1024 and with medium image quality settings even in not-very-new games. In the currently standard resolution of 1920x1080 the GeForce GT 640 can deliver no more than 20 fps with but few exceptions. And it is no faster than 10 fps in the newest gaming titles. So, this product cannot be recommended for gamers. It can be used as a display adapter though, especially as, like all Kepler-based products, it allows connecting up to four displays simultaneously.

On testing participants: Except the reference card from Nvidia, we’ve discussed three unique GeForce GTX 650 Ti models from EVGA, Gigabyte and Zotac. Each has its own peculiarities. The EVGA card has the fastest GPU clocked at 1072 MHz, high overclocking potential, and the lowest price due to 1 GB of memory. The 2GB Gigabyte features the most efficient and quietest cooler plus a D-Sub output. The compact Zotac is comes with overclocked GPU and memory, becoming the fastest GTX 650 Ti among the four. On the other hand, they all have quite a lot of things in common: PCBs and memory chips, DVI interfaces, comparable accessories, warranty and the overclocking potential of the graphics memory. So, there are quite a few god options to consider, if you want a GeForce GTX 650 Ti.